A few people expressed interest in me answering some questions regarding competitive programming/problemsetting/related stuff. Since I have a bit of free time during these holidays, let's try this. I'll choose a few most interesting questions from comments under this post and try to answer them in a single video.

Ideally a question should not be to broad ("please give us some tips and tricks" is probably too broad) and possible to answer within a few minutes. I probably won't answer a question if it was asked a lot of times here on CF/quora/someplace else. Let's go!

LooOOoOOOooOOOOoLoOOooOOooOOooOOLoOoOOOOoOOoL. ROFL. LMAO. It doesn't take a genius to guess his answer to these sort of questions. In fact, any type of question about talent is useless. So what if he says yes? And so what otherwise? Is that gonna make you feel better about yourself because you have an excuse to not be red due to absence of "innate talent" or is that gonna make you feel worse because you are not as "talented" as him?

Either way, only God (if you are not atheist) knows why you have "lesser talent" than the OP and couldn't become red even after a "long time". So please stop asking such useless questions.

I am most certainly sure it isn't just practice. Many IGM's and LGM's have practiced more than he did, and still practice and participate more than he does. Still he always has a 1 digit rank in every single contest. Of course there are exceptions but they are drastically low in number.

I would like other high rated people or possibly tourist himself to address to this question too :P What do you think?

Try asking him what made him so good? You'll probably just get the same old answer everyone else is saying — practice. Maybe you could trying asking God why he gave tourist more than everyone else? Better, ask him why he made Trump the president when there were clearly better options.

Did you keep taking breaks from competitive programming when you were practising during your prime? What other activities did you do apart from CP during your peak to avoid mental exhaustion(physical games or any other such stuff).

What is so different in USSR countries that favours growth of strong competitive programmers? Coaching for CP begins at very early age? Is it manifested in some sort of curriculum of high school? Because not many countries have curriculum based which favours competitive programming until 16-18 years of age (but they support programming in general).

You can read my Quora answer here. Basically, good extracirricular math/programming education, top-notch training camps for school students, an all-Russian olympiad diploma reserves you a spot in a university of your choice regardless of your exam scores.

I didn't like that at all. It's fine to link some definition, not the theorem you should use. And for sure not something that maybe has links to the theorem you should use, and maybe not: take a guess, maybe you will just waste time.

It would be fine in a long contest (like 10-day Codechef), where time doesn't matter much.

After solving a number of **exercises** and understand the most common **algorithms**. What is the way you would use to **train**? It is important the amount of problems, but how to improve the **quality** and get better?

what is your practice nature or training road map in your starting point in CP ? what are things or mistakes that you did in your training and said "If time came back I would not do that things or make it more better ?

what is your recommended trianing road map from your great experience in CP ?

Do you write things on paper when solving a problem? I find it impossible to solve without writing, yet you and Petr make screencasts with commentaries where you solve complex stuff without writing stuff.